We are told that the universe-our universe-is expanding, even accelerating, but into what? What lies inside its boundary? What lies outside? What fuels the expansion? The impetus from an explosion some hundreds of billions of years ago? Or is new energy flowing in, fueling the expansion, creating new stars, speeding up its growth? At the other end of the spectrum, are the "particles" that we know only by their tracks actually tiny clumps of "something?" Or can their existence-or not-be explained in some simpler way? Or might they just be figments of our mathematics, like Einstein's metaphor of time as a discernable substance? the picnic at the edge of the universe sketches out a new model and offers some surprising but obvious answers to these questions by taking a new look at and around the barriers and mental models that have blocked our view since we first began to ask "what's it all about?"